Various methods and apparatuses have been developed for removing thigh meat from thigh bones or femur of poultry and fowl. Generally cut-up lines for bird carcasses can operate at high capacity, but suspend the carcasses from their ankle joints. As a result the legs can thereby only be amongst the last items to be processed. Moreover this manner of suspension is not always ideal in getting the best yield of meat and in preventing contamination by bone fragments. It has therefore become increasingly popular to process thigh meat separately from the traditional cut-up lines, at the disadvantage of having to collect the yet unprocessed thighs and convey and feed these one by one to a dedicated processing device. Part of this drawback has been overcome in that one or a plurality of such thigh processing devices can be operated simultaneous to a cut-up line. Such dedicated thigh deboning devices, as disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. No. 3,510,908, are often relying on manual labour, can be cumbersome to operate, and clearly do little to increase processing speed.
Accordingly it is an object of the present invention to propose an improved method and apparatus for deboning animal thighs for separating and collecting meat from the thigh bone. In a more general sense it is an object of the invention to overcome or ameliorate at least one of the disadvantages of the prior art. It is also an object of the present invention to provide alternative structures which are less cumbersome in assembly and operation and which moreover can be made relatively inexpensively. Alternatively it is an object of the invention to at least provide the public with a useful choice.